Some of this is terrible. Some of this is beautiful. For more information, please visit www.imfinethankyou.net

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Thinking back to 2010 – that Spring and early Summer, the coming of Fall…I have to say, I miss it. Parts of it anyway. I can’t say that I was having fun, exactly. There were times that my grievous howling cries were heard by passerby. My bones hurt. Everything hurt. I could barely walk. I thought I had shellshock, trench mouth.

Still there was the soaring and it swept me up. It did. When I began to get strange bruises (a side effect of taking too high a dose of prescribed venlafaxine?) and my spine felt like it was on fire and I saw the sacral form everywhere…it was scary.

The sense I made of it was beautiful though, if only because it was so brazen, so earnestly audacious. It was a reclamation of some sort, a destruction and a bridge. So many of the dreadful things that can happen to a person happened in such a short amount of time…though the same could be said of the wondrous.

No one person should bear so much strange witness in such a short and unanticipated period.

Of course, in the aftermath, I could see that – really – it had all been building for a very long time. It is rare indeed that something comes out of nowhere. I think that I – all the sudden – became everything I had ever been too afraid to be, without even a second thought I fell into all my lost lives. That probably doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t have to.

I am straddling a lot of different lines lately and that is where I usually get tangled. Writing helps me to keep clear and though I haven’t posted here in a few days, I have been filling up pages…here and there, in messages sent by phone.

Tomorrow I am going to work again and that will be good. It will have to be good, it is what is happening.

Even if it is bad, it will be good.

Everything is, at the very least, interesting.

faithrhyne@gmail.com

10:15 AM (10 hours ago)

to me

(Remember. I experiment with narrative tense and perspective, although some ‘dissociative tendencies may be evident.’ Whatever. Regarding paranoid delusions, I understand that the odds of me actually being a Spy are very slim. At any rate, it is a fascinating thing to consider.) (By the way, I don’t know who ‘We’ is…it just sounds better than I.)

I AM NEVER ALONE.

Is it possible to be a Spy and to not know it?

This is something that she wonders about.

As she drives to work and walks around the grocery store with her children, she thinks about spies. We are all, she has decided, spies in our own right. She pays attention, she wonders what the connections are. Sending out messages, bits of information, and hoping for the right recipient, she seeks information.

What would have seemed like abject paranoia 20 years ago, is now a definite possibility. Given the vast networks of exchange inherent in interweb technologies and the way that certain topics tend to operate, even the most hapless among us can become Spies, whether or not we even realize it.

Of course, we’re not actually hapless. We’re really quite clever. Many of us have diagnoses in regard to our processing styles and the peculiar things that catch our eyes and hold our hearts. A lot of us get bored by things that are supposed to be fun and we make up our own games.

We started having problems with the Real World when it stopped seeming real and when we figured out that they always pick on the rogue, ignore the underdog. It got boring and sad. We stopped paying attention to it. Still, it crept in…in videos and links and a growing understanding of how, precisely, it all operates.

Me? I still live in the real world. I drive to work and there I am me. I pick up my children from school and there I am me. I have been careful to not create falsehood, an avatar. I am always me, with my own name.

That’s one thing I can’t stand about Spies.

They lie.

I try to be honest.

A few years ago, I wanted to start a league. The League of the Left Field. In honor of the open space on the edge of the game, and the sun beats down and the trees cast shadows that never quite reach you. You are just a single player, watching the clouds and forgetting the game, listening to the sound of the highway and the buzz of cicadas.

I live playing that position. I am a Left Fielder. Everywhere I go, in all ways that are me, I am acutely aware of what is going on around me. This is not paranoia.

It is gestalt processing.

I am good with maps and I know what direction I am facing at all times. I determine points and scale and intersections with ease. I learned that it is possible to get from anywhere to anywhere else and back again.

The places I love most on maps are the empty ones, the spaces where the roads stop short like dying dendrites.

One day, I’d like to go to all those empty places, desert and wilderness.

For now, I live in a tangle of roads.

They say that Asheville, North Carolina is the Center of the Universe.

When I think about it, it is…because at all times I know precisely where I am at and how where I am at connects with other places, other people, other…ideas?

Yes, I orient myself ideologically in much the same way that I orient myself spatially. I avoid social scenes, because I don’t like how they work. I really appreciate people, however, when they keep it real.

******
Due to my participation as a gestalt-processor in the ethered realm of information exchange, and due to the fact that I am on a list or probably should be, given the fact that I seem to have designed this extrapolation to almost ensure that I am on a list and am being surveilled*…well, it is possible that I have unwittingly become a Spy.

Hahahahahahaha! That’s ridiculous!

*Yeah, I know. “What were you thinking?” This is my mother’s voice. I’m not really sure what I was thinking*, but it makes me smile at least a few times a day. I like a good true story. Even if nobody pays attention at all and I just continue to say whatever I want to say and make all sorts of wild conjectures…well, it’s still a good story. It keeps me interested.

****************************************************************

“Sort of the opposite…that people with “atypical” processing (not specifically Asperger’s-style, which is really not very specific to begin with and seems another catch-all diagnoses for those who experience the world differently) may – at a young age and in their involvement with medical model mental health and American culture – develop disordered frameworks in areas of cognitive/sensory/emotional processing which later may evolve into the disordered realities of association that characterize psychosis.

In thinking about Synesthesia and the psychotic spectrum, there are some interesting intersections. Principles of psychology and neuroplasticity inform us that the brain/mind develops in response to stimuli and experience.

If the way that a person experiences the world leads them to increased vulnerability to trauma, or if they experience trauma in things that most people do not find traumatic (such as flourescent lighting) and are then punished for their attempts to communicate distress, painful pathology arises within frameworks that may not be inherently distressing or destructive.”

Hello, all – I haven’t been here in a long while. Just re-posted an(other) introduction :) Yeah, it’s been that long.

I have been working on/talking to people about this idea that: perhaps some folks who carry diagnoses of schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder/bipolar w/psychotic features have neurodivergent sensory/cognitive/emotional processing and that the sensory/cognitive/emotional trauma that is sustained when one experiences the world differently and is punished for who they are creates disorders of distress and that perhaps there ought to be a broad reconsideration of the etiology of these disorders.

A lot of the adults that I work with who have diagnoses that, like myself, put them on the psychotic spectrum probably would have been dx’ed with Asperger’s Syndrome or another processing “disorder” if they’d been born later.

The fact that wonderful and unusual processing is seen as a “disorder” is another issue entirely.